Because a Book of Days has to include the Leap Days too! There was even a February 30th once, in Sweden, in 1712, as part of a ploy to restore the Old Calendar and jettison the new Gregorian. It failed.
It appears, however, that the gods of fate, chance and destiny, who are the ultimate determiners of human lives, do not have February 29th in their calendars, for in writing the Book of Life they have virtually omitted it. Pope Paul III was born on that date in 1468; the composer Rossini in 1792; Moraji Desai, the Indian politician who succeeded Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister, in 1896; Jimmy Dorsey, bandleader, in 1904, but that is all, and we are already moving from ubiquity to mere celebrity, from the eternal to the ephemeral, even in naming somebody already as forgotten by most of us as he. History demands ubiquity, or else it condemns to oblivion; celebrity is remaindered where ubiquity is not achieved. A hundred leap years from now, and this list which is only four will likely be reduced to three, or even two. Other days in the calendar run to hundreds.
The Grim Reaper appears to have made the latter decision about February 29th as well; or perhaps he simply misunderstood the concept of leaping, and thought that it referred to him. He leaped right over the day, froggie-style. No famous deaths are recorded on it.
There are events, however, events and incidents and coincidences of such seismic unimportance, of such tectonic triviality, of such cosmic forgettability, that no one would ever have noticed the bump if I hadn't mentioned them here.
http://www.historyorb.com/events/february/29 has an extensive list, but trust me, it isn't worth the effort on this occasion.
http://www.infoplease.com/dayinhistory/February-29 has picked out what it regards as the most significant, which is just seven across the entirety of universal history, and includes such world-changing events as the opening of the first Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960 - the world's very first Playboy Club anywhere might have been worth a footnote in the appendix to a set of marginal additions to an obscure PhD thesis locked away in the remaindered section of a university library, but surely not this. Hattie McDaniel becoming the first black woman to win an Oscar - as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in "Gone with the Wind" in 1940 - is definitely worth mentioning, but is still celebrity and not ubiquity; while the accusation of witchcraft against Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, is outdone and rendered irrelevant by the far more significant "January 22, 1953: first performance of Arthur Miller's play 'The Crucible' at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway", because - and this too is an aspect of the nature of History that we need to understand - no one would remember the three "witches" today had Miller's play not been so successful, and Miller's play was not about those three witches anyway, or only superficially, allegorically, but really about the McCarthy hearings, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (see Oct 20), an event which some would say is best forgotten, but that, of course, is the whole point - what is best forgotten is usually what we most need to remember, to give ourselves the best chance of not repeating it.
The first leap day of all was announced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, and as far as history is concerned it has been a fascinating innovation, but unsuccessful. Caesar, and later Pope Gregory, gave us an extra day once every four years, a unique occasion on which to do something, anything, the same, or different. We have let them down badly. The history of the Leap Year is a history of missed opportunity. It has been, in short, a non-event.
And why the number 515 at the top of this page? Each page of this blog is headed by a year pertaining to that page. Caesar gave us the first leap year in 46 BCE; this is being written in 2014, which is not a leap year. 2060 years apart nevertheless, divided by 4... you can do the arithmetic yourself...
http://www.infoplease.com/dayinhistory/February-29 has picked out what it regards as the most significant, which is just seven across the entirety of universal history, and includes such world-changing events as the opening of the first Playboy Club in Chicago in 1960 - the world's very first Playboy Club anywhere might have been worth a footnote in the appendix to a set of marginal additions to an obscure PhD thesis locked away in the remaindered section of a university library, but surely not this. Hattie McDaniel becoming the first black woman to win an Oscar - as Best Supporting Actress for her role as Mammy in "Gone with the Wind" in 1940 - is definitely worth mentioning, but is still celebrity and not ubiquity; while the accusation of witchcraft against Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, is outdone and rendered irrelevant by the far more significant "January 22, 1953: first performance of Arthur Miller's play 'The Crucible' at the Martin Beck Theater on Broadway", because - and this too is an aspect of the nature of History that we need to understand - no one would remember the three "witches" today had Miller's play not been so successful, and Miller's play was not about those three witches anyway, or only superficially, allegorically, but really about the McCarthy hearings, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (see Oct 20), an event which some would say is best forgotten, but that, of course, is the whole point - what is best forgotten is usually what we most need to remember, to give ourselves the best chance of not repeating it.
The first leap day of all was announced by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE, and as far as history is concerned it has been a fascinating innovation, but unsuccessful. Caesar, and later Pope Gregory, gave us an extra day once every four years, a unique occasion on which to do something, anything, the same, or different. We have let them down badly. The history of the Leap Year is a history of missed opportunity. It has been, in short, a non-event.
And why the number 515 at the top of this page? Each page of this blog is headed by a year pertaining to that page. Caesar gave us the first leap year in 46 BCE; this is being written in 2014, which is not a leap year. 2060 years apart nevertheless, divided by 4... you can do the arithmetic yourself...
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